Heybirdz

AI Powered Community Event Discovery

Project Overview:‍

HeyBirdz is a personal product concept created to solve an everyday problem my family, friends, and I experienced firsthand: discovering everything happening in our local community shouldn't require checking dozens of websites every weekend.

Local events are scattered across municipal calendars, venue websites, social media, tourism pages, ticketing platforms, and neighborhood organizations. Finding something to do often means spending more time searching than actually enjoying the event.

Our goal was to create a single destination where families, couples, and residents could quickly discover concerts, farmers markets, festivals, kids activities, food events, outdoor recreation, and seasonal experiences happening throughout Cary, North Carolina.

To accomplish this, the platform combines automated data collection with AI-assisted organization to surface relevant local events in a clean, searchable interface.

Link - https://heybirdz.com/

Role:

AI Workflow Design

Product Vision

UX Research

Tools:

AI-assisted ideation - Cursor / ChatGPT

AI Scraping Agents & Automated Web Crawlers

Figma Make

The Problem: Fragmented Local Discovery

— Hey Birds is designed and developed from soup to nuts as a collaborative passion project, the platform serves as a centralized, ultra-clean event hub. Under the hood, it leverages automated AI agents that continuously scrape, clean, and categorize data from dozens of local sources, updating the feed twice daily without manual editorial overhead. Beyond simple aggregation, the platform is evolving into an intelligent AI Concierge Service, offering tailored, interactive itinerary planning for families, couples, and active locals.

What's Happening

The Goal

Design a sleek, hyper-local, mobile-first experience that consolidates every happening in Cary into one intuitive, highly filterable interface, while removing the burden of manual data entry.

Problem: Solve family outings, date nights, or weekend activities

Problem: Solve cognitive load of searching across 20+ different venue sites

Problem: Solve streamlining an event aggregator which isn't cluttered with ads, poorly organized, or visually dated.

Backend Orchestration

Autonomous AI Scraping Agents

Why This Works - A core technical triumph of Hey Birds is its automated data pipeline. To keep the platform running seamlessly without a dedicated editorial team, we implemented autonomous background AI agents.

Continuous Scraping & Monitoring: Background agents systematically monitor targeted venue websites, ticketing platforms, and city schedules for new or updated event listings.

Intelligent Data Parsing: Unstructured raw text is ingested by AI models that automatically extract and standardize critical data points: Event Title, Date/Time, Precise Location, Cost/Ticket Links, and Age Appropriateness.

Automated Tagging & Categorization: The AI intelligently tags listings into intuitive UX buckets (e.g., Music, Family, Food & Drink, Free, Sports & Fitness), ensuring the frontend filters remain accurate and dynamically updated twice a day.

Feature Spotlight

From Static Directory to Active Concierge

While the free tier of Hey Birds solved the discovery problem, we wanted to design a premium, high-value layer for active families and locals. The Hey Birds Membership unlocks our proprietary AI Concierge, transforming the platform from a passive search tool into an active, conversational planner.

The Membership: A premium tier designed to turn casual local searchers into highly engaged, subscribed power-users.

The AI Concierge: A conversational assistant that handles the cognitive load of planning, generating curated, family-friendly weekend itineraries on demand.

Smart Automation: Bridges the gap between raw data and personal convenience, delivering personalized local experiences straight to a user's fingertipsf

Feature Spotlight

Rewarding Local Exploration with Badges

To keep users actively engaged and encourage families to explore new corners of Cary, we designed a custom Gamification & Badges System. Rather than relying on empty digital points, our badges incentivize real-world community connection. Users unlock custom badges, like Downtown Explorer, Support Local, or Arts Patron, by attending events across different categories. This turns weekend planning into a fun, family-friendly challenge while driving repeat engagement and boosting retention for the platform.

The Problem: Users often stick to the same familiar weekend routines, ignoring the wider variety of local community events.

The Solution: An interactive Badges & Rewards System that turns exploring Cary into a rewarding, habit-forming challenge for families and active locals.

The Mechanics: Users unlock themed badges (e.g., Outdoor Adventurer, Foodie Crawler) by attending diverse local events, tying directly into membership perks and fostering community loyalty.

Conclusion

— HeyBirdz began as a simple family problem: finding things to do in our community shouldn't require searching dozens of websites. By combining thoughtful user experience design with AI-assisted content organization, we transformed fragmented local information into a centralized discovery platform focused on helping people spend less time searching and more time enjoying their community. Beyond solving today's problem, the project establishes a foundation for future AI-powered concierge experiences that can deliver personalized recommendations, intelligent trip planning, and deeper community engagement.